CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2007/wiki1b 6 c1

Take a case of the Singleton pattern and implement it as succinctly as possible in Ruby and Java. Compare the two implementations in terms of clarity and succinctness. The example should be a "real-world" example. While it may be grossly oversimplified for the purpose of illustration, it should not be totally contrived (i.e., should not raise the question, Why would anyone ever want to do that?).

Illustration The singleton pattern is a pattern used to insure the existence of a single instance of the class in the run time. As it construct the object once and return a reference to this object every time after. In multithreading environment special care should be taken, as it will be illustrated later in this page.

Implementation - The constructor of this class is turned to private. - Another public function is used to call this constructor. - If the object is not initialized yet (object == null) it call the constructor and return a reference else it will just return a reference.

In multithreading environment a synchronized command should be used so not every thread in the program can initialize his own instance of the singleton class.

Java

public class LoggerSingleton {

  private static LoggerSingleton instance = null;
  protected LoggerSingleton() {
     // Exists only to defeat instantiation.
  }
  public static LoggerSingleton getInstance() {
     if(instance == null) {
        instance = new LoggerSingleton();
     }
     return instance;
  }

}

Ruby

require 'singleton'

class LoggerSingleton

 include Singleton 

end

a = LoggerSingleton.instance »

1. <MyClass:0x401b4ca8>

b = LoggerSingleton.instance »

1. <MyClass:0x401b4ca8>

class Test

 private_class_method :new
 @@singleton = nil
 def Test.instance
   @@singleton = new if @@singleton == nil
   return @@singleton
 end
 def initialize
   @thread = Thread.new { sleep 10 }
 end

end

test = Test.instance

Test singletons

Following a code to test singleton class in Java:

import org.apache.log4j.Logger; import junit.framework.Assert; import junit.framework.TestCase; public class SingletonTest extends TestCase {

  private LoggerSingleton sone = null, stwo = null;
  private static Logger logger = Logger.getRootLogger();
  public SingletonTest(String name) {
     super(name);
  }
  public void setUp() {
     logger.info("getting singleton...");
     sone = LoggerSingleton.getInstance();
     logger.info("...got singleton: " + sone);
     logger.info("getting singleton...");
     stwo = LoggerSingleton.getInstance();
     logger.info("...got singleton: " + stwo);
  }
  public void testUnique() {
     logger.info("checking singletons for equality");
     Assert.assertEquals(true, sone == stwo);
  }

}

in ruby;

def test_singleton

 class << OnlyOne.instance
   def reset
     # reset state
   end
 end

 OnlyOne.instance.modify_state
 OnlyOne.instance.reset

end

Conclusion

Java doesn’t contain singleton pattern in the language itself, although implementation for the pattern is still possible. While in Ruby the singleton pattern is in the language itself, which became possible since Ruby is a dynamic language through singleton module.